Want to Lose Weight? Let Your Doctor Pick Your Diet

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If you're trying to lose weight, you may want to let your doctor
choose your diet plan, rather than choosing your own: In a new
study, people who chose the type of diet they wanted to follow
lost less weight than the people who followed a specific diet
assigned by their doctor.

In the study, 105 people who were trying to lose weight were
allowed to choose between a
low-carbohydrate diet and a low-fat diet. Among these
participants, 58 percent chose a low-carb diet, and 42 percent
chose a low-fat diet. For a separate group of 102 people, the
researchers assigned a low-fat diet to 52 percent of the people
and a low-carb diet to the other 48 percent.

After following their diet plans for almost a year, the people
who were allowed to choose their own diet plan lost 12.6 lbs.
(5.7 kilograms) on average, whereas the people in the group whose
doctors assigned their diets lost 14.7 lbs. (6.7 kg) on average.

Previous research comparing the effectiveness of low-carb diets
and low-fat diets has shown that both
diets can work, as long as people adhere to them, said study
author Dr. William Yancy, of Durham VA Medical Center in Durham,
North Carolina. The researchers wanted to conduct the study
because "it felt intuitively that if you let people choose their
diet based on their food preferences (…) that they would stick to
the diet better," he said.

The researchers figured that the people who stuck to their diets
better would lose more weight, so they were surprised to find
that the people who chose their diets actually lost less weight
than the people whose diets were picked for them. [ 7
Biggest Diet Myths ]

The researchers think the reason people may lose less weight when
they choose their own diet plan is that they may choose a plan
that includes more of the foods they like to eat, which, in turn,
makes it difficult for them to scale back on these foods, Yancy
said.

"People might
adhere to a diet better if it has foods that they prefer, but
they actually might overeat those foods, and that might be to
their detriment," Yancy told Live Science.

Conversely, "if the diet that they are following eliminates some
of the foods that they prefer, then they might actually lose more
weight," he said.

However, he noted that, although the people in the study who
chose their diet plan did not lose as much weight as those who
had the decision made for them, this does not mean that doctors
should not present their patients with different diet options."It
is just that [patients] might not be the right people to choose
among those options," Yancy said.

Future research should examine how to match people with the diets
that would work best for them, by considering such factors as
their metabolic profiles or genetics, instead of their
food preferences, the researchers said.

"I think we do have enough information to know that different
diets work differently in different people; we just need to get
better at pairing the diet with the person," Yancy said.

The new study was published today (June 15) in the journal Annals
of Internal Medicine.